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Improve Application Development Throughput

Drive down your delivery time by eliminating development inefficiencies and bottlenecks while maintaining high quality.

  • The business is demanding more features at an increasing pace. It is expecting your development teams to keep up with its changing needs while maintaining high quality.
  • However, your development process is broken. Tasks are taking significant time to complete, and development handoffs are not smooth.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Lean development is independent of your software development lifecycle (SDLC) methodology. Lean development practices can be used in both Agile and Waterfall teams.
  • Lean isn’t about getting rid of sound development processes. Becoming lean means fine-tuning the integration of core practices like coding and testing.
  • Lean thinking motivates automation. By focusing on optimizing the development process, automation becomes a logical and necessary step toward greater maturity and improved throughput.

Impact and Result

  • Gain a deep understanding of lean principles and associated behaviors. Become familiar with the core lean principles and the critical attitudes and mindsets required by lean. Understand how incorporating DevOps and Agile principles can help your organization.
  • Conduct a development process and tool review. Use a value-stream analysis of your current development process and tools to reveal bottlenecks and time-consuming or wasteful tasks. Analyze these insights to identify root causes and the impact to product delivery.
  • Incorporate the right tools and practices to become more lean. Optimize the key areas where you are experiencing the most pain and consuming the most resources. Look at how today’s best development and testing practices (e.g. version control, branching) and tools (e.g. automation, continuous integration) can improve the throughput of your delivery pipeline.

Improve Application Development Throughput Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should make development teams leaner, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

Improve Application Development Throughput – Executive Brief
Improve Application Development Throughput – Phases 1-3

1. Conduct a current state analysis

Acquire a holistic perspective of the development team, process, and tools to identify the bottlenecks and inefficiency points that are significantly delaying releases.

Improve Application Development Throughput – Phase 1: Conduct a Current State Analysis
Lean Implementation Roadmap Template
Lean Development Readiness Assessment

2. Define the lean future state

Identify the development guiding principles and artifact management practices and build automation and continuous integration processes and tools that best fit the context and address the organization’s needs.

Improve Application Development Throughput – Phase 2: Define the Lean Future State

3. Create an implementation roadmap

Prioritize lean implementation initiatives in a gradual, phased approach and map the critical stakeholders in the lean transformation.

Improve Application Development Throughput – Phase 3: Create an Implementation Roadmap

Member Testimonials

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.

10.0/10

Overall Impact

$117,799

Average $ Saved

57

Average Days Saved

Client

Experience

Impact

$ Saved

Days Saved

Association of American Medical Colleges

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

9

Alex was knowledgeable in the areas of Agile, DevOps and Software delivery performance and led me to right research materials. Alex talked about t... Read More

Los Angeles County Internal Services Department

Guided Implementation

10/10

$117K

105

Wescam

Guided Implementation

10/10

$1,000

2

Workshop: Improve Application Development Throughput

Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

Module 1: Conduct a Current State Analysis

The Purpose

  • Assess the current state of your development environment.
  • Select a pilot project to demonstrate the value of your optimization.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • Realization of the root causes behind the bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your current development process.
  • Valuation of your current development tools.
  • Selection of a pilot project that will be used to gather the metrics in order obtain buy-in for wider optimization initiatives.

Activities

Outputs

1.1

Assess your readiness to transition to lean development.

  • Lean development readiness assessment
1.2

Conduct a SWOT analysis and value-stream assessment of your current development process.

  • Current state analysis of development process
1.3

Evaluate your development tools.

  • Value assessment of existing development tools
1.4

Select a pilot project.

  • Pilot project selection

Module 2: Define Your Lean Future State

The Purpose

  • Establish your development guiding principles.
  • Enhance the versioning and management of your development artifacts.
  • Automatically build and continuously integrate your code.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • Grounded and well-understood set of guiding principles that are mapped to development tasks and initiatives.
  • Version control strategy of development artifacts, including source code, adapted to support lean development.
  • A tailored approach to establish the right environment to support automated build, testing, and continuous integration tools.

Activities

Outputs

2.1

Assess your alignment to the lean principles.

  • Level of alignment to lean principles
2.2

Define your lean development guiding principles.

  • Development guiding principles
2.3

Define your source code branching approach.

  • Source code branching approach
2.4

Define your build automation approach.

  • Build automation approach.
2.5

Define your continuous integration approach.

  • Continuous integration approach

Module 3: Create Your Implementation Roadmap

The Purpose

  • Prioritize your optimization initiatives to build an implementation roadmap.
  • Identify the stakeholders of your lean transformation.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • Phased implementation roadmap that accommodates your current priorities, constraints, and enablers.
  • Stakeholder engagement strategy to effectively demonstrate the value of the optimized development environment.

Activities

Outputs

3.1

Identify metrics to gauge the success of your lean transformation.

  • List of product, process, and tool metrics
3.2

List and prioritize your implementation steps.

  • Prioritized list of tasks to optimize your development environment
3.3

Identify the stakeholders of your lean transformation.

  • Identification of key stakeholders
Unlock This Blueprint

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

MEMBER RATING

10.0/10
Overall Impact

$117,799
Average $ Saved

57
Average Days Saved

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve.

Read what our members are saying

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst

Get the help you need in this 3-phase advisory process. You'll receive 6 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.

Guided Implementation 1: Conduct a current state analysis
  • Call 1: Kick off your lean transformation initiative.
  • Call 2: Evaluate your readiness for lean to alleviate your development inefficiencies and pain points.

Guided Implementation 2: Define the lean future state
  • Call 1: Discuss your understanding and application of lean principles in your development culture.
  • Call 2: Discuss how version control and source code management will be used in your development team.
  • Call 3: Discuss how automated build and continuous integration will fit.

Guided Implementation 3: Create an implementation roadmap
  • Call 1: Review your lean development roadmap.

Author

Alex Ciraco

Contributors

  • Ken Piddington, CIO and Executive Advisor, MRE Consulting
  • Jesse Mussio, IT Manager, 3M
  • Scott Ambler, Senior Consulting Partner, Scott Ambler + Associates
  • Gary Lee, Chief Technology Officer, Veterans United Home Loans
  • Emilio Chemali, Director of Business Intelligence & Analytics, MRE Consulting
  • One Anonymous Company Interviewed (Financial Firm)

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